The Fall Classic has finally arrived, with the incumbent American League champion Kansas City Royals taking on the surprising New York Mets, who have made it to the World Series for the first time in 15 years.
This mouth-watering matchup, pitting the outstanding Mets starting pitchers against the resilient Royals lineup, has the odds at dead even, per Odds Shark, setting up what hopes to be a lengthy best-of-seven series.
With each team going for its first World Series title since Ronald Reagan occupied the White House, here is a preview of Game 1:
On Monday, Royals manager Ned Yost announced right-hander Edinson Volquez will be the Game 1 starter, per Matt Axisa of CBS Sports, opposite Mets righty Matt Harvey.
Unfamiliarity could steer the matchup in the Mets’ favor, as Alex Rios is the only Royals batter who has faced Harvey in his career, going 1-for-3 while playing for the Chicago White Sox in 2013, per Baseball-Reference.com.
Harvey is 2-0 with a 2.84 ERA in two playoff starts and will be pitching on nine days’ rest. He’s anchoring a quartet of high-velocity starters alongside Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard and Steven Matz. Yost believes all four Mets starters are aces, per Erik Boland of Newsday.
“They’re all good,” Yost said. “You look at all four starters that they’re going to start, they’re all phenomenal. All of them.”
The Royals will counter with an offense that makes more contact than any other, putting the ball in play 74 percent of the time, according to Jay Jaffe of Sports Illustrated. Yost believes this efficiency gives the Royals a great advantage, per Boland.
“It does, and if you go back at our numbers, we do pretty well against power pitching,” Yost said. “So that definitely helps.”
The Mets are averaging 6.1 runs per game in the playoffs and have done so against star pitchers such as Zack Greinke, Clayton Kershaw, Jon Lester and Jake Arrieta—well above the pedigree of Volquez, who is 1-2 with a 4.32 ERA and coming off a 7-1 defeat in Game 5 of the American League Championship Series.
Experience could also be an early factor, as Curtis Granderson and Juan Uribe (who’s nursing a chest injury) are the only Mets with World Series experience, according to George A. King III of the New York Post.
The Royals will be the first team the Mets have faced in the postseason with successful October experience. Kansas City has won four of its last five playoff series, dating back to last year.
The Royals will be playing with an unfinished-business bravado after last year’s heartbreaking loss to the San Francisco Giants, per Vahe Gregorian of the Kansas City Star.
“Maybe it’s true that even beating the Mets wouldn’t make that singular anguish vanish,” he wrote. “But the inverse might be true, too: The Royals wouldn’t be back here without the infusion of experience and motivation they derived from the way last season ended.”
The Mets will compete, but settling in may come at the expense of an early road loss at the hostile Kauffman Stadium.
Prediction: Royals win 5-4.
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